Prince George has ancestors who settled in South Australia

Prince George of Cambridge plays during a Plunket nurse and parents group visit at Government House on April 9, 2014 in Wellington, New Zealand. Source: The Advertiser

WHEN baby Prince George arrives in Australia, diehard republicans will no doubt protest he is just another over-privileged royal with no more right to reign over them than a kangaroo.

But it seems that the little fellow has rather more in common with the average Aussie.

Through a horny-handed, sheep-stealing ancestor, he is actually related to hundreds, possibly even thousands, of modern Australians.

Thanks to his grandmother, Carole Middleton, 59, the eight-month-old can trace his roots to a 19th-century farm labourer from Kent, in England’s southeast, who was found guilty of stealing three lambs and handed the obligatory sentence: transportation to Australia.

But will this new-found blood link help in the Royal Family’s continuing battle against the republican movement or strengthen arguments for the Duke of Cambridge, 32, eventually becoming Governor-General of Australia?

The third in line to the throne’s ties are the result of a human drama that, in microcosm, tells the story of the forging of Australia itself.

After his transportation from Kent, farm labourer Samuel Hickmott started his new life in the young nation, breaking rocks as a member of a chain-gang. It would take him 10 years to win his freedom.

That name has survived the decades in between to be borne by the Duchess of Cambridge’s uncle, Gary Goldsmith.

Prince William and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge in Dunedin, New Zealand. Picture: David Rowland/Getty Images)

In December 1839, Samuel Hickmott and his brother Thomas were arrested and accused of stealing the three lambs.

The brothers were similar to many members of the 19th century underclass, suffering a combination of insufficient work, poor health, under-nourishment and the withering effects of the Industrial Revolution. Both of them had been to jail and the workhouse.

Of course they were breaking the law, but for them, it was the only way to feed their starving families.

Samuel had four children by two wives, but both women died. With farm work hard to find, he twice placed the children in the Lamberhurst poor house.

He and his brother Tom served short jail terms for vagrancy, but in their defence, the pair were the last to be chosen for any work because they were unable to read or write.

When the Hickmott brothers were arrested, they were at breaking point. They appeared at Maidstone Assizes, an hour southeast of London, on January 2, 1840, and an airtight case was made to the judge.

The brothers had stolen the lambs and the remains of the meat was found in their houses. The prosecution, determined to secure convictions, produced the lambskins and evidence from two local butchers.

Thomas, of “a notoriously bad character”, was sentenced to be transported for life.

Sophia Elizabeth Goldsmith Hickmott, who married Henry Hickmott, the son of convict Samuel Hickmott, an ancestor of Kate, Dutchess of Cambridge. Samual Hickmott was transported for 10 years to Australia for stealing three lambs

His younger brother Samuel was sentenced to 10 years’ transportation.

This meant a life sentence. Convicts were not given a return ticket and rarely raised enough money to buy one.

So for the theft of three lambs, the Hickmott brothers were shipped to the other side of the world – Van Diemen’s Land, now known as Tasmania – with no hope of return.

The 101-day journey across the high seas on the prison ship Asia was a living hell and the brothers stepped ashore with great relief.

Samuel would spend the next decade working on a chain-gang, breaking rocks and helping to prepare roads on the island, with no hope of escape.

While little is known of Thomas’s fate, the gruelling punishment did not break Samuel. More than eight years later, he received a conditional pardon and was released.

In a bullish mood, he sailed to South Australia, where he met one of his four sons – Henry, who was just 15 when he last saw his father.

Henry had pledged to start a new life and brought his young bride, Sophia Goldsmith, whom he’d met in Kent where her family were neighbours of the Hickmotts.

Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, during the Royal Tour of New Zealand.

Even in the fetid steerage cabins, the journey aboard the migrant ship Emily, accompanied by its sister-ship named – appropriately, you might say – Kate, was more luxurious for the newlyweds than it had been for Hickmott senior.

The couple arrived in Botany Bay on September 9, 1850, and prepared themselves for an exhausting trip across the vast continent to the colony of South Australia.

Sophia Goldsmith was tall, dark and willowy. The marriage, however, was not to last beyond its fifth year. After producing three children, the youngest of whom was to rise to become a Member of Parliament, Sophia died.

The Hickmotts – Samuel, his son Henry and Henry’s son, Henry Edward – steeled themselves for rough times ahead. Samuel worked as a labourer, while his son Henry sweated it out in the local brickworks at Mount Barker. The men were hard and they were ambitious.

WHEN the Australian Gold Rush began, all three travelled 300 miles southwest overland from Mount Barker to Clunes, near Melbourne, in the Victorian goldfields, where father and son worked all hours as miners, labourers and brickmakers.

Aged 72, after years of being toughened on the chain-gang, it is recorded that Samuel was still hard at work, helping build the family fortune. However he died not long after.

His son Henry and grandson Henry Edward moved to Charlton in Victoria, where they eventually bought a farm and established a brickmaking business.

Prince George of Cambridge plays during a visit to a kindergarten in Wellington, New Zealand. Picture: Marty Melville-Pool/Getty Images

Henry Edward would go on to become a successful building and roads contractor.

More than 40 years after his grandfather left England in chains, Henry Edward was poised to become the MP for Pingelly.

While his mother died soon after his birth, he named his first child Sophia. In a portrait, above, she shows a striking similarity to her kinswoman, the Duchess of Cambridge.

So, what of the Goldsmiths who remained in England?

Sophia’s carpenter father hated the fact the family had been shamed by his daughter’s marriage to the son of a sheep-stealer.

Sophia’s brother, John, meanwhile, remained a labourer and brickmaker. Likewise his son, also named John, as did the next generation’s male progeny, Stephen.

For a century, while the Hickmotts slaved away to improve their fortunes in Australia, the Goldsmiths trod water both socially and professionally. Only when Stephen’s son, Ron Goldsmith, become an engineer and builder did their prospects improve.

Could Prince George have descendants of his relatives living in South Australia? Picture: Marty Melville/Getty Images

It was an upward trajectory that has ended with the extraordinary achievements of their daughter, Carole Middleton, producing a daughter who is mother to the future king of England and Australia.

Henry Edward Hickmott – Samuel’s grandson – and his wife Elizabeth had 12 children and it is their numerous descendants who make up the nucleus of what has been dubbed the “Australian Royal Family”.

The three siblings – Henry Edward, Eliza and Emma – were Prince George’s first cousins, five times removed.

Despite cousinage becoming watered down, descendants of these Hickmotts have a right to claim kinship with the future king.

Today, they range from blue-collar workers through to middle-class professionals and such well-known Australian figures as Brendon Grylls, a Western Australian MP, and IT multi-millionaire Stanley Lewis.

While he won’t know it, Prince George will be among his people, his relatives, when he travels throughout Australia, including Adelaide, next Wednesday.

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Comments on this story

Goulburn Wanderer of Australia Posted at 12:47 AM April 15, 2014

Prince George has relatives in both Canberra and Goulburn. I am Queen Elizabeth II's 7th cousin (on paper) and we are not related to the Middletons.

Arjayempee of Perth Posted at 10:54 PM April 14, 2014

Contrary to what you state above, the Royal Family does not have a "continuing battle against the republican movement". The Queen has stated she is perfectly happy to go along with whatever the Australian people wish - which at the moment, is to keep her as head of state.

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